...And the end of the semester slams into me like an out-of-control freight train, one car after another piling up on top of the other. Just when I think I'm caught up --boom!--another stack of papers or administrative duty or student emergency barrels down on me. It's been difficult to focus on my own research/reflections of late.
Nevertheless (to switch locomotive metaphors), I am seeing a bit of light at the end of the finals-week tunnel, and in that dim illumination I've noticed some interesting developments on the faith-in-public-life front.
Stanley Fish wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times this week in which he repeated his compelling arguments concerning the vexed position of faith in an ostensibly secular state. As you may be aware, the Supreme Court recently ruled (in Salazar v. Buono) that a cross erected decades ago in the Mojave desert did not in fact violate the First Amendment's establishment clause. The Mojave Cross's history and conflict is rather complicated, not at all like the clear-cut melodramas of--say--Ten Commandment Monuments built specifically to provoke challenges to church/state separations.
Originally erected in 1934 on government land as a way of honoring WWI veterans, the cross has apparently been rebuilt a number of times by private parties, most recently by Henry Sandoz, who (without government permission) drilled holes into the rock outcropping to make the cross he built harder to remove. The cross serves as a gathering place for local Christians at Easter. Its compatibility with the First Amendment has only recently became an issue. In 1999, a request to build and place a Buddhist symbol to honor war dead was denied. In 2001, retired park service employee Frank Buono challenged the legality of the cross, arguing that it represented a clearly religious statement by the state and therefore violated the Establishment clause.
A number of complex political and legal moves and counter-moves followed; courts tended to side with Buono, but legislatures tended to act to protect the cross from removal. These conflicts culminated in the government's attempt to transfer the land around the cross to a private group, ostensibly negating the First Amendment conflict. "Tilt!" cried Buono and his lawyers. That act, they argued, was a shady dodge by the government specifically to preserve the cross, constituting yet another act of religious favoritism by the government.
The Supreme Court, then, ruled primarily on the issue of whether the government's land transfer was legal. The ancillary import of the ruling, of course, concerns whether or not the cross itself constitutes a religiously specific statement that the government cannot endorse officially. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the transfer was legal, that (in Justice Kennedy's opinion for the plurality), the cross served a secular purpose (honoring veterans) rather than a religious one.
Fish clarifies that he personally has no problems with a cross in the desert on government lands. But the reasoning Kennedy advances, Fish argues, strains credulity. The Court performs what has come to be the standard maneuver for preserving religious (and here religious almost always means "Christian") symbols on government property: it drains the symbols of religious import. The cross, in Kennedy's rhetorical scenario, is not faith-specific but generic, a common cultural marker of respect and homage. This--despite arguments from the plaintiffs that, for example, no Jewish person would consider a cross on her grave to be a generic and unexceptionable symbol of respect.
Moreover, Fish points out, Kennedy doesn't merely stop at declaring the cross non-religious; he also attempts a defense of the government's accommodating religious symbols more specifically. These two lines of argument, writes Fish, undermine each other. The court seems to want the cross to be simultaneously religious and secular, an intellectually dishonest stance that puts the lie to the court's claims to religious neutrality. Says Fish: "The Christian and conservative Web sites that welcomed the decision as a blow for Christianity and against liberalism knew what they were looking at."
To be sure, conservative Christian websites did welcome the decision. But, to extend Fish's argument a bit, I don't think it's actually in Christianity's best interests to praise the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too reasoning of t Salazar v. Buono. Surely for Christians--conservative evangelicals especially--the cross is and must be specifically, specially religious. To claim otherwise is to deny the significance of one of the key events in our faith story.
I should note that, for many conservative evangelicals, their stance on the government's display of religious symbols remains refreshingly honest. For them, the cross (like the Ten Commandments displays or nativity scenes) is specifically, uniquely Christian. Their arguments for having governmental displays of such symbols rest on the concomitant rationale that the US itself is specifically, uniquely Christian. I disagree strongly that the US is "Christian" in the sense they mean, and I therefore dispute their case for using tax dollars to pay for the construction and upkeep of massive Ten Commandments displays. But at least, in those cases, the faith status of the cross is never in question. The cross is exclusively Christian, and its display is advanced by Christian exclusivists (or, at least by people who believe it right and proper for the USA to have a primarily Christian character).
This--the religious nature of the state, the state's proper boundaries for displaying or preferring one religion (or any religion) over another (or none at all)--this is a vital debate to have in a world where states find themselves adjudicating between wildly or even violently divergent faith worldviews. It's vital, too, for Christians to involve themselves in this debate, to test out how and to what extent we want a government to prefer our religion over others (even if that preference doesn't translate to exclusivism). Evangelicals and Religious Right pundits often rail about the dangers of godless governments, but really--can anyone point to an overtly/offically religious state that doesn't have a horrifying history of specifically faith-inspired violence and/or oppression? Does Christianity really thrive when it's in control of the government? Or--if not control--how might faith as such secure a voice in representative democracies? Isn't there a difficult but happier medium between theocracy and utter secularity?
And that's the problem with the "religionless religious symbols" argument. It seems to advance theocratic interests, but ultimately it contributes to a faith-less society. It renders us less able to debate about the role of religion in government or in public life.
If the goal is to ensure that crosses and Commandments displays on government land remain intact, then the legal loophole of it's-not-really-religious seems tactically advantageous; it gets immediate results (i.e., the continued display of Christian symbols). But, aside from the dishonesty involved in pretending that the cross isn't religious, the tactic contributes to a dangerous secularizing trend. It reinforces the view that faith and faith-based stances really do have no place in democratic government, that faith is always only private and personal. Religious motivations and faith-based value arguments become vaguely embarrassing, like bodily functions. They come to exist only behind closed doors or facades of neutrality. Surely such a view of faith is the opposite of what Christians and other religious viewpoints want. We want--we need--for faith to be a part of the public discourse about the Good. Otherwise, faith--and to a certain extent values in general--becomes some subterranean, mysterious force that no one has a vocabulary for.
It helps us not at all, then, to pretend that faith doesn't exist or doesn't clamor for representation in a democracy. Let the cross remain religious, and let the debate begin. Don't settle for arguments that de-Christianize a Christian image. After all, didn't Christ have some grave words for those who would deny him?
More later,
JF
Showing posts with label secularism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label secularism. Show all posts
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Taylor, Secularity, Science
So, I'm approaching the halfway point in Charles Taylor's massive, wonderful work, A Secular Age. I'm generally a quick reader, able to rip through texts briskly. As I tell my graduate students, though, some kinds of writing demand that even the speediest reader slow down.
Taylor's is definitely one of those slow-it-down works. This is the magnum opus a senior-level super-scholar like him spends a decade or more producing, and such an epic-but-detailed study requires time and thought from readers. It's the kind of book that, as I read it, I can tell that it's re-shaping the deep structures of my thinking about present-day evangelicalism. Again, I'm only halfway through it, but I can't help but write/rave a bit about it to hash out some of his thoughts for myself.
As the title suggests, Taylor's interested in secularity (he mostly limits his scope to Western culture). He defines secularity not as the simple absence of religious belief nor even (pace the neo-athiests) as conscious rejection of religion. Instead, secularity as he defines it consists of religious belief becomes an option--an increasingly unusual or unpopular one--among an ever-growing range of belief options. By religion or faith, Taylor means (I simplify) a view of the human life-world shot through with the understanding or assumption of a particular dimension or significance (a "fullness" in his terms) to existence that transcends the material world.
How did it come about, he asks, that this assumption of a beyond-the-material, religious dimension of life enjoyed a default status in the 1500s but has in the 2000s become merely an option--and an increasingly discredited one at that? Drawing on a lifetime of study in history and faith, Taylor revisits and revises well-received narratives about the gradual displacement of faith in (mainly Western) culture. Specifically, he refutes two predominant, common-sense explanations for the present-day secular age.
First, he criticizes what he calls the "subtraction story" of secularism, in which post-Renaissance Humanity gradually sheds its primitive, constraining skin of superstition and mysticism, revealing a pure core of ever-maturing (scientific, naturalistic, materialist) reason. Thus, present-day secularity=humanity - religion.
Second, he departs as well from what might be called a replacement narrative, in which the energies previously devoted to religious faith and practice aren't so much shed as transformed by and subjugated to reasoned, scientific naturalism.
Both of these stories, Taylor contends, ignore the extent to which the historical victors in these struggles--the pure core of human reason finally freed from the jail of superstition; or the ever-indomitable figure of naturalistic science--are themselves products of historical processes. The triumph of secular reason occurs not out of some obvious philosophical superiority over faith but because historical processes in Western culture brought about different modes of thought about humanity, about knowledge, about society, about the world--all of which changed the ground rules for what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate belief.
Or, to tackle this from a different angle: in the present, "science"--meaning materialist, observable-data, no-supernatural-explanations-allowed processes for knowledge--enjoys an unprecedented degree of assumed superiority over other modes of inquiry (e.g., religious or metaphysical modes). I say "science" in scare quotes to designate that this concept refers not to a specific methodology practiced by scientists but more to a general category at work in the social imaginary. If you want truth, nothing delivers today like "science." Why is this so?
For some proponents of "science" (or "reason"), science fully deserves its hard-won reputation for epistemological superiority. It really is better than any other mode of knowledge or study. Or, rather, a particular field or sub-field of study is considered better, more rigorous, more respectable, to the extent that it resembles the practices constitutive of "science," i.e., eschewing supernatural or non-material mechanisms a priori, producing knowledge as quantifiable and accumulative data sets, using inquiry modes that are independently verifiable by different investigators using the same experimental conditions, etc.
Now--lest I be misunderstood--I do not dispute that "science" as so defined works like gangbusters for a number of inquiries. If I want to know what causes influenza (and how to stop it), why stars go nova (and when/if ours will) , or what kind of seatbelt saves the most lives in a front-end car crash--give me science, please. Experiments, controls, repetition, peer review--all of these components of scientific processes produce (at their best) beautifully consistent, usable knowledge-sets. I can create a vaccine to avoid getting sick. I can rest assured that Sol has billions of years left to it. I can choose the safest seatbelt. In these and other fields, science compellingly sets up and passes the test of "does it work? does it produce results?"
But, as Taylor and numerous other historians have noted, the perceived superiority of "science" hasn't stayed restricted to such material questions. Throughout the nineteenth century, the scientific criterion for inquiry crept into and reshaped the groundrules for a number of disciplines that ask less concrete questions--history, law, sociology, psychology, aesthetics, philosophy, and politics. In all of these and more, scholars and researchers scrambled to standardize their practices, to make them resemble this new kind of inquiry that had proven so useful in other arenas.
Such science-ization has proven less successful for the fields of religion and theology. Unlike, say, an anthropology of religion or history of theology, theology per se typically holds as foundational certain warrants that are incompatible with "science," e.g., the existence of God. For this very reason, some thinkers--the neo-Atheists like Richard Dawkins, for example--consider theology (or religious belief more broadly) a non-starter. It isn't, can't be, "scientific" because its very practice, inquiry into and about the supernatural, violates naturalistic precepts. Not scientific=not reasonable=irrational/discredited.
Now, I'm just getting to the part where Taylor deals with the 19th century, where many of these changes I've skimmed over take place. I've not yet read his treatment of that century or of the next, and I can hardly wait to read his lengthy rumination on/response to these developments and their present-day incarnations. But, were I to guess at his response to the religion=not science=compromised equation (which he presages throughout), I would imagine he would point out that that equation only proves compelling from the same vantage point that legitimates science in the first place. That is, religion fails a legitimacy test only when the game is "how scientific is it?" But the notions that the how-scientific-is-it criterion is A) clearly and naturally identifiable as a selfsame concept over time; and B) automatically--always and everywhere--superior to other criteria--these are imminently contestable.
Science's self-evident definition and superiority are new assumptions, new players on the philosophical field. As such, these assumptions don't get to declare themselves victors simply by changing the game's rules for everyone else ("Only purple teams can score points. Purple team wins!").
That's my guess at Taylor's conclusions, anyway. I'll update when I read them for myself.
More later,
JF
Taylor's is definitely one of those slow-it-down works. This is the magnum opus a senior-level super-scholar like him spends a decade or more producing, and such an epic-but-detailed study requires time and thought from readers. It's the kind of book that, as I read it, I can tell that it's re-shaping the deep structures of my thinking about present-day evangelicalism. Again, I'm only halfway through it, but I can't help but write/rave a bit about it to hash out some of his thoughts for myself.
As the title suggests, Taylor's interested in secularity (he mostly limits his scope to Western culture). He defines secularity not as the simple absence of religious belief nor even (pace the neo-athiests) as conscious rejection of religion. Instead, secularity as he defines it consists of religious belief becomes an option--an increasingly unusual or unpopular one--among an ever-growing range of belief options. By religion or faith, Taylor means (I simplify) a view of the human life-world shot through with the understanding or assumption of a particular dimension or significance (a "fullness" in his terms) to existence that transcends the material world.
How did it come about, he asks, that this assumption of a beyond-the-material, religious dimension of life enjoyed a default status in the 1500s but has in the 2000s become merely an option--and an increasingly discredited one at that? Drawing on a lifetime of study in history and faith, Taylor revisits and revises well-received narratives about the gradual displacement of faith in (mainly Western) culture. Specifically, he refutes two predominant, common-sense explanations for the present-day secular age.
First, he criticizes what he calls the "subtraction story" of secularism, in which post-Renaissance Humanity gradually sheds its primitive, constraining skin of superstition and mysticism, revealing a pure core of ever-maturing (scientific, naturalistic, materialist) reason. Thus, present-day secularity=humanity - religion.
Second, he departs as well from what might be called a replacement narrative, in which the energies previously devoted to religious faith and practice aren't so much shed as transformed by and subjugated to reasoned, scientific naturalism.
Both of these stories, Taylor contends, ignore the extent to which the historical victors in these struggles--the pure core of human reason finally freed from the jail of superstition; or the ever-indomitable figure of naturalistic science--are themselves products of historical processes. The triumph of secular reason occurs not out of some obvious philosophical superiority over faith but because historical processes in Western culture brought about different modes of thought about humanity, about knowledge, about society, about the world--all of which changed the ground rules for what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate belief.
Or, to tackle this from a different angle: in the present, "science"--meaning materialist, observable-data, no-supernatural-explanations-allowed processes for knowledge--enjoys an unprecedented degree of assumed superiority over other modes of inquiry (e.g., religious or metaphysical modes). I say "science" in scare quotes to designate that this concept refers not to a specific methodology practiced by scientists but more to a general category at work in the social imaginary. If you want truth, nothing delivers today like "science." Why is this so?
For some proponents of "science" (or "reason"), science fully deserves its hard-won reputation for epistemological superiority. It really is better than any other mode of knowledge or study. Or, rather, a particular field or sub-field of study is considered better, more rigorous, more respectable, to the extent that it resembles the practices constitutive of "science," i.e., eschewing supernatural or non-material mechanisms a priori, producing knowledge as quantifiable and accumulative data sets, using inquiry modes that are independently verifiable by different investigators using the same experimental conditions, etc.
Now--lest I be misunderstood--I do not dispute that "science" as so defined works like gangbusters for a number of inquiries. If I want to know what causes influenza (and how to stop it), why stars go nova (and when/if ours will) , or what kind of seatbelt saves the most lives in a front-end car crash--give me science, please. Experiments, controls, repetition, peer review--all of these components of scientific processes produce (at their best) beautifully consistent, usable knowledge-sets. I can create a vaccine to avoid getting sick. I can rest assured that Sol has billions of years left to it. I can choose the safest seatbelt. In these and other fields, science compellingly sets up and passes the test of "does it work? does it produce results?"
But, as Taylor and numerous other historians have noted, the perceived superiority of "science" hasn't stayed restricted to such material questions. Throughout the nineteenth century, the scientific criterion for inquiry crept into and reshaped the groundrules for a number of disciplines that ask less concrete questions--history, law, sociology, psychology, aesthetics, philosophy, and politics. In all of these and more, scholars and researchers scrambled to standardize their practices, to make them resemble this new kind of inquiry that had proven so useful in other arenas.
Such science-ization has proven less successful for the fields of religion and theology. Unlike, say, an anthropology of religion or history of theology, theology per se typically holds as foundational certain warrants that are incompatible with "science," e.g., the existence of God. For this very reason, some thinkers--the neo-Atheists like Richard Dawkins, for example--consider theology (or religious belief more broadly) a non-starter. It isn't, can't be, "scientific" because its very practice, inquiry into and about the supernatural, violates naturalistic precepts. Not scientific=not reasonable=irrational/discredited.
Now, I'm just getting to the part where Taylor deals with the 19th century, where many of these changes I've skimmed over take place. I've not yet read his treatment of that century or of the next, and I can hardly wait to read his lengthy rumination on/response to these developments and their present-day incarnations. But, were I to guess at his response to the religion=not science=compromised equation (which he presages throughout), I would imagine he would point out that that equation only proves compelling from the same vantage point that legitimates science in the first place. That is, religion fails a legitimacy test only when the game is "how scientific is it?" But the notions that the how-scientific-is-it criterion is A) clearly and naturally identifiable as a selfsame concept over time; and B) automatically--always and everywhere--superior to other criteria--these are imminently contestable.
Science's self-evident definition and superiority are new assumptions, new players on the philosophical field. As such, these assumptions don't get to declare themselves victors simply by changing the game's rules for everyone else ("Only purple teams can score points. Purple team wins!").
That's my guess at Taylor's conclusions, anyway. I'll update when I read them for myself.
More later,
JF
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The Truth About Truth, and Some Secular History as Well
By "I'll address it tomorrow," I apparently meant "the day after tomorrow."
Quick recap: postmodernism (that fiendish enemy of worldview-apologist evangelicals) posits that "truth" changes over time, that it's contingent upon factors like culture and era. Any one human in a particular time and place certainly experiences various "truths" as solid and binding, but none of those truths are consistent enough, universal enough, to qualify as trans-historical or trans-cultural. Humans lack any unambiguous access to Ultimate Truth since the only tools they have to conceive of, identify, investigate, and communicate that Truth are culture-dependent variables like language.
I reiterate that this characterization of postmodern belief is actually agnostic regarding the question of Ultimate, Capital-T "Truth" except to say that such Truths aren't available as such for human consideration. All we have are small-t truths that may be (in the long run) changeable and multiple. A worldview-analysis evangelical would take issue with that on a couple of points, insisting that 1) singular, unchanging Truth does exist and 2) humans can in fact know that Truth. I'm dealing here only with the first criticism.
The criticism, then: what about the postmodern truth about the contingency/multiplicity of truths? Does postmodernism apply its position about truth to itself? In other words truth only flexible or multiple within a postmodern context? Worldview analysis teaches to its evangelists-in-training an ace-in-the-hole comeback to postmodern views that runs along these lines, albeit in a more simplistic form: If you don't believe in Singular, Universal Truth, what about the truth-status of your belief about human's inability to know Truth?
As I see it, I have two obvious answers at my disposal. First, I could deny that postmodern arguments about truth apply to postmodernism itself. I could claim that postmodernism's only Certain Truth is the ever-changing nature of truth as humans experience it. In other words, the only thing certain is nothing's certain (except for this statement about nothing being certain, 'cause that's certain). That's a bit too blatantly circular for me.
I prefer option two: postmodernism does accept the contingency of its own truths about Truths. Paradoxical as it seems, truth at some other point in history/geography isn't (wasn't) contingent and multiple but eternal and singular. Contingency and multiplicity are recent epistemological events (at least in the west).
Traveling back in time past 500 years or so would plop you into a world in which many of the truths we now see as culture-contingent or variable existed only as a Singular Way Things Are. Truth back then was not contingent, not postmodern, but singular and eternal. It isn't that the 500 years ago folk were simply incorrect, not seeing the flexing/changing/multiple truths that must have existed; it's that those other, different/competing truths didn't exist as possible Things To Believe.
I'm reading a book by Charles Taylor called A Secular Age that echoes this line of thought. On its face, Taylor's work is a history of the rise of skepticism (i.e., disbelief in religion, especially in Christianity). Taylor refuses, however, to write either a simple replacement story where Science (or Reason) comes to displace Christianity or a "subtraction story" about how Christianity simply got cut out of culture. Rather, his is a narrative of multiplication. He wants to know how western culture went from a point in c. 1500, when belief in God was a given, to c. 2000, when belief in any religion is seen as but one option among an ever-expanding variety of possible belief/non-belief options.
In other words, in 1500, it was virtually impossible to be an atheist in the same way (and certainly with the same ease) with which it is possible to be an atheist today. Crucially, the lack of widespread atheism wasn't due to churches' waging some widespread campaign of repression against the atheist ancestors of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. Certainly there were many repressive campaigns and inquisitions, but these were mainly about heretics--people who were seen as faking orthodox faith in favor of some heterodox faith--not atheists in the modern sense. We have tons of records from such heretics, their heresy trials, their horrendous (and to our eyes unjust) punishments. Repression of that sort produces a lot of historical records, a lot of martyrs whose ghosts (and writings, and followers) cry out.
But none of the ghosts of inquisitions past wail a dirge about how "God is not great." None of them died arguing that scientific reason was a superior alternative to religious faith. In other words, it's not the case that there were tons of atheists back then being held down by church power. The church didn't repress Dawkins-esque atheists on any kind of grand scale because the option to be atheist (or agnostic, or "spiritual" instead of "religious," or anything of that sort) simply did not exist as it does today.
Taylor demonstrates that the situation of Christian faith as one truth among many conceivable options is a relatively new development in western culture. This situation relies upon--developed from--a number of cultural and historical and geographic factors that did not obtain in times past. Religious truth, then, was at one point relatively singular in the West. Now it is multiple, postmodern.
It's tempting to say that past generations were just plain wrong. I could argue, perhaps, that the present range of religious/non-religious options did indeed exist in the past--even if only as theoretical possibilities. Past generations just failed to be aware of them as such, much like past generations failed to apprehend the heliocentric solar system. I suppose that's true, but only in the most abstract, hypothetical sense. It's possible, for example, to imagine that someone back in 1300 imagined a whole profession in which people would be hurtled into orbit so as to explore space. But functionally, really, the option to be an astronaut--the truth of astronautics--only emerged in recent times. Only through an act of anachronistic imagination could we even conceive of astronauts sitting around in 1300s France waiting impatiently for rockets et al. to be invented.
It may be odd to consider secularity (or the notion of multiple/contingent truths) as a recent innovation/invention in the same sense as astronautics. But all of these are, I argue, dependent upon technologies, sciences, ways of thinking, tools, and discourses that are utterly of the here and now. In the past they were not merely as-yet-undiscovered but wholly unimagined.
So, in that sense, yes--the postmodern fact of truth's contingent, multiple status is itself contingent and multiple, dependent upon features unique to this time and place. Truth has been different--not postmodern--in the past, and it likely will be different--not postmodern--in the future. Indeed, you don't have to travel far to find places in the present where a postmodern understanding of truth as multiple/contingent simply isn't a viable possibility except perhaps as crazy philosophical science fiction.
More tomorrow,
JF
Quick recap: postmodernism (that fiendish enemy of worldview-apologist evangelicals) posits that "truth" changes over time, that it's contingent upon factors like culture and era. Any one human in a particular time and place certainly experiences various "truths" as solid and binding, but none of those truths are consistent enough, universal enough, to qualify as trans-historical or trans-cultural. Humans lack any unambiguous access to Ultimate Truth since the only tools they have to conceive of, identify, investigate, and communicate that Truth are culture-dependent variables like language.
I reiterate that this characterization of postmodern belief is actually agnostic regarding the question of Ultimate, Capital-T "Truth" except to say that such Truths aren't available as such for human consideration. All we have are small-t truths that may be (in the long run) changeable and multiple. A worldview-analysis evangelical would take issue with that on a couple of points, insisting that 1) singular, unchanging Truth does exist and 2) humans can in fact know that Truth. I'm dealing here only with the first criticism.
The criticism, then: what about the postmodern truth about the contingency/multiplicity of truths? Does postmodernism apply its position about truth to itself? In other words truth only flexible or multiple within a postmodern context? Worldview analysis teaches to its evangelists-in-training an ace-in-the-hole comeback to postmodern views that runs along these lines, albeit in a more simplistic form: If you don't believe in Singular, Universal Truth, what about the truth-status of your belief about human's inability to know Truth?
As I see it, I have two obvious answers at my disposal. First, I could deny that postmodern arguments about truth apply to postmodernism itself. I could claim that postmodernism's only Certain Truth is the ever-changing nature of truth as humans experience it. In other words, the only thing certain is nothing's certain (except for this statement about nothing being certain, 'cause that's certain). That's a bit too blatantly circular for me.
I prefer option two: postmodernism does accept the contingency of its own truths about Truths. Paradoxical as it seems, truth at some other point in history/geography isn't (wasn't) contingent and multiple but eternal and singular. Contingency and multiplicity are recent epistemological events (at least in the west).
Traveling back in time past 500 years or so would plop you into a world in which many of the truths we now see as culture-contingent or variable existed only as a Singular Way Things Are. Truth back then was not contingent, not postmodern, but singular and eternal. It isn't that the 500 years ago folk were simply incorrect, not seeing the flexing/changing/multiple truths that must have existed; it's that those other, different/competing truths didn't exist as possible Things To Believe.
I'm reading a book by Charles Taylor called A Secular Age that echoes this line of thought. On its face, Taylor's work is a history of the rise of skepticism (i.e., disbelief in religion, especially in Christianity). Taylor refuses, however, to write either a simple replacement story where Science (or Reason) comes to displace Christianity or a "subtraction story" about how Christianity simply got cut out of culture. Rather, his is a narrative of multiplication. He wants to know how western culture went from a point in c. 1500, when belief in God was a given, to c. 2000, when belief in any religion is seen as but one option among an ever-expanding variety of possible belief/non-belief options.
In other words, in 1500, it was virtually impossible to be an atheist in the same way (and certainly with the same ease) with which it is possible to be an atheist today. Crucially, the lack of widespread atheism wasn't due to churches' waging some widespread campaign of repression against the atheist ancestors of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. Certainly there were many repressive campaigns and inquisitions, but these were mainly about heretics--people who were seen as faking orthodox faith in favor of some heterodox faith--not atheists in the modern sense. We have tons of records from such heretics, their heresy trials, their horrendous (and to our eyes unjust) punishments. Repression of that sort produces a lot of historical records, a lot of martyrs whose ghosts (and writings, and followers) cry out.
But none of the ghosts of inquisitions past wail a dirge about how "God is not great." None of them died arguing that scientific reason was a superior alternative to religious faith. In other words, it's not the case that there were tons of atheists back then being held down by church power. The church didn't repress Dawkins-esque atheists on any kind of grand scale because the option to be atheist (or agnostic, or "spiritual" instead of "religious," or anything of that sort) simply did not exist as it does today.
Taylor demonstrates that the situation of Christian faith as one truth among many conceivable options is a relatively new development in western culture. This situation relies upon--developed from--a number of cultural and historical and geographic factors that did not obtain in times past. Religious truth, then, was at one point relatively singular in the West. Now it is multiple, postmodern.
It's tempting to say that past generations were just plain wrong. I could argue, perhaps, that the present range of religious/non-religious options did indeed exist in the past--even if only as theoretical possibilities. Past generations just failed to be aware of them as such, much like past generations failed to apprehend the heliocentric solar system. I suppose that's true, but only in the most abstract, hypothetical sense. It's possible, for example, to imagine that someone back in 1300 imagined a whole profession in which people would be hurtled into orbit so as to explore space. But functionally, really, the option to be an astronaut--the truth of astronautics--only emerged in recent times. Only through an act of anachronistic imagination could we even conceive of astronauts sitting around in 1300s France waiting impatiently for rockets et al. to be invented.
It may be odd to consider secularity (or the notion of multiple/contingent truths) as a recent innovation/invention in the same sense as astronautics. But all of these are, I argue, dependent upon technologies, sciences, ways of thinking, tools, and discourses that are utterly of the here and now. In the past they were not merely as-yet-undiscovered but wholly unimagined.
So, in that sense, yes--the postmodern fact of truth's contingent, multiple status is itself contingent and multiple, dependent upon features unique to this time and place. Truth has been different--not postmodern--in the past, and it likely will be different--not postmodern--in the future. Indeed, you don't have to travel far to find places in the present where a postmodern understanding of truth as multiple/contingent simply isn't a viable possibility except perhaps as crazy philosophical science fiction.
More tomorrow,
JF
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